My first exposure to the word serendipity must have been as a child, reading about the pink sea monster in the Stephen Cosgrove book.
I sat down just a bit ago to respond to an e-mail message from a stranger in Japan and ended up discovering the origin of the word, which is worth sharing. Serendipitous, indeed.
From Dictionary.com:
Word History: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for the word serendipity, which he coined in one of the 3,000 or more letters on which his literary reputation primarily rests. In a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.” Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of “a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of….”